ExclusiveDukas: The Sorcerer's Apprentice

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Paul Dukas: The Sorcerer's Apprentice. This beautiful piece was preserved by European Archive. It has Creative Commons license (CC BY 3.0 DEED Attribution 3.0 Unported) and is provided through www.musopen.org.

Paul Dukas's only claim to great fame was The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which he wrote in 1897. Dukas saw himself as a teacher, composing. He destroyed many of his compositions before his death. Nevertheless, he managed to produce several major works in addition to his one great success.

"The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is a symphonic poem subtitled "Scherzo after a ballad by Goethe", and is based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1797 poem of the same name.

The poem "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" tells the dramatic story of a sorcerer's apprentice who, partly out of laziness and partly out of arrogance and presumption, uses a sorcerer's spell to make a broom do his job of fetching water at a moment when his master is absent. The spell works, the broom runs, but the broom does not stop when the young man wants it to. The apprentice does not know what words would stop the water-fetching-spell. Desperate to stop the walking broom, he attacks it with an axe. The broom splits in two parts, and both parts come to life and draw water. The situation is desperate, the ground is flooded and the Apprentice is panicking. Then, at the end of the poem, his master, the sorcerer, returns and orders the brooms to be at rest and become normal brooms again.

Goethe's poem is masterfully written. It has always been a pleasure to recite. So is this composition, a real pleasure to listen to. You can feel the story in the music, and how the instrumentation is used to recreate the young man's desire to use a magic that he should not, his initial success, his despair when the brooms do not stop and everything drowns in the water, and finally the relief when his master returns and saves the day.

The video was captured by Christian Schlegel and edited by Wenjing Ma.







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